Yikes. Dana Milbank reports that a few congressional Democrats are still "rusty" when it comes to investigations--apparently, Henry Waxman was outmatched by Paul Bremer of all people during Iraq hearings on Tuesday. (The hearings have still been extremely valuable.)
This doesn't seem to be a universal phenomenon though. Democrats on the Senate Commerce Committee--especially John Kerry--tore the White House a new one yesterday during hearings on climate change. Chris Mooney's report is worth reading. Most strikingly, the acting chair of the Climate Change Science Program embraced the recently-released summary report from the IPCC in no uncertain terms, noting that "the [climate] changes over the last several decades are mostly due to human activities."
That's certainly a good sign, seeing as how it was only last year that the president was insisting, "There is a debate over whether [global warming is] manmade or naturally caused." But now, bizarrely, the White House is trying to claim that it has always recognized man-made climate change. The letter itself is pretty outlandish and worth reading.
--Bradford Plumer